STORY: Residents in parts of Afghanistan desperately searched for survivors, after one of the worst earthquakes to hit the country flattened entire villages overnight.
Authorities said hundreds of people were killed and thousands more injured across Kunar, Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces in the east and northeast.
“We need urgent help,” this man said. “Our children, women, elders and the dead are still buried beneath the debris.”
The magnitude-6 quake struck around midnight local time, at a depth of about 6 miles.
Civilians and soldiers were seen working together, rushing the wounded onto military helicopters.
But rescuers struggled to reach remote mountainous areas cut off from mobile networks along the Pakistani border, where mudbrick homes collapsed in the quake.
This local medical official said it took five or six hours of walking to reach some of the disaster hit areas.
A U.N. humanitarian official said there has also been heavy rain in the region, so there was an added threat of landslides and rock slides.
While rescue teams were also trying to dispose of animal carcasses quickly, to minimize the risk of contamination to water resources.
This was Afghanistan’s third major deadly quake since the Taliban took over in 2021.
It’s set to further stretch the resources of the South Asian nation, which is already grappling with humanitarian crises – from a sharp drop in foreign aid to mass deportations of its citizens from neighboring countries.
